For anyone like me covering the Razorbacks, returning from vacation to find Dean Weber not the University of Arkansas'head trainer is about like coming home to a different house on your own yard.

A fixture seems dreadfully out of place.

Dean has been mending and rehabbing injured Razorbacks for some 35 years now. Now he'll equip them instead of treat them.

Effective this week, Weber becomes the director of equipment for the now combined Razorback men's and women's programs and Joe Sheehan of the Jacksonville Jaguars already is in town and assuming the role as the Razorbacks' head football trainer for first-year coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino and Sheehan were acquainted during Petrino's 1999-2001 tenure as the Jaguars' quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator.

Given the turnover rate since Jeff Long replaced 50-year Razorback icon Frank Broyles as athletics director, it's natural to assume Weber made this move like a hostage staring at a loaded gun.

However, Weber insists this was his request and actually was a move he first tried to make when Broyles was athletics director and Houston Nutt was head football coach.

Broyles and Nutt wanted Weber in the training room where he's been so valuable not only as an innovator in rehab and modifying equipment to alleviate aggravating injuries, but as the crusty team psychologist with a heart of gold.

Players have swapped barbs with him yet loved him for decades as he served coaches Broyles, Lou Holtz, Ken Hatfield, Jack Crowe, Joe Kines, Danny Ford and Nutt.

Since longtime administrative-assistant coaching icon Wilson Matthews passed on, there hasn't been anybody in the Broyles Complex other than Broyles himself who has had the string of old grads coming to see him like they come to see Dean.

The senior class from the Razorbacks' 1979 team even paid to have a scholarship endowed in Weber's name.

None continually put in the hours to earn such love and respect. The trainers'cars inevitably are the first on the lot in the morning and among the last to leave at night.

Sometimes they don't leave at all. Weber and his top assistants like Dave England, still the trainer for Razorback basketball, and Eric Linson were known to stay round the clock in 24-hour rehab to get an ailing player fit to play on Saturday.

All that and supervising the summer workouts, wisely mandated by the NCAA after heat-related deaths during unsupervised " voluntary " workouts, takes its toll.

Weber, 62, said he was more than ready to do something else.

Unfortunately, the longer one has been great at his job, the tougher it can be for those who long worked under him when things change.

We've seen that with Weber changing jobs and John McDonnell retiring.

Linson decided without Dean to work for and a new man in charge that his Hog future with this new regime appeared too cloudy for him to continue. He has resigned effective immediately.

Meanwhile McDonnell, Arkansas' head cross country coach since 1972 and head track coach since 1978, left not only a legacy of 42 national championships and 85 conference championships, but three good men in field events coach Dick Booth, sprints coach Kyle White and administrative assistant Danny Green.

New coach Chris Bucknam, hired as head coach from Northern Iowa, retained both Booth, who had been a candidate to replace McDonnell, and Green.

Understandably, he wanted someone he was familiar working with and brought with him from Northern Iowa sprints-pole vault coach Doug Case, formerly an assistant at Arkansas State.

So White, a good coach and a former Razorback under McDonnell and Booth, is odd man out with the fall semester about to begin.

Two tough breaks for two good men who now must replant from the seeds of change.

Razorback fans should wish them well.

Nate Allen covers University of Arkansas athletics for the Northwest Arkansas Times.